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could it be any worse.. tweet-a-boo, i see you.. the struggle continues - yet many dont care.. sovereignty, liberity, freedom, rights or privilege..
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could it be any worse
The massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is finally reaching the shores of the Gulf Coast, in what many have called the worst environmental disaster since the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Not only does it have the potential to threaten hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife in the area, but more importantly the livelihood of many who make a living fishing in the nation's richest seafood region.
More than 200,000 gallons of oil a day have been spewing into the ocean since British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank off the Louisiana coast last week. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that BP, is "the responsible party" according to U.S. law and is "required to fund the cost of cleanup operations." In fact, in a letter sent last year to the Department of the Interior, the oil giant objected to what it described as "extensive, prescriptive regulations" proposed for more rigorous safety standards stating. "We believe [the] industry's current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs continue to be very successful."
Last year, BP made more than 40 billion in profits yet paid no taxes in the United States.
This oil spil could not have come at a more significant time given that just a few weeks ago President Obama asked Congress to lift a drilling ban in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches and called for new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to central Florida.
President Barack Obama has pledged "every single available resource" to deal with the situation and called the leak a "spill of national significance,"
The real threat is to thousands of independent African American and small businesses in the region that make a living via fishing and tourism. If there is a significant reduction in the oyster, shrimp and fish populations, which has been in decline anyway over the past decade, it may signal an end to the livlihoods of many.
In Louisiana for example, 12 percent of all businesses are owned by African Americans with coastal cities like Baton Rouge having 17 percent black-owned business, most in the fishing and tourism industries. The same can be said of Mobile, Ala., where 14.8 percent of business are black-owned compared to 9 percent for the state of Alabama. If this problem is not under control soon, many family owned and small African American businesses in the Gulf region may not survive.
tweet-a-boo, i see you
If you are an avid reader, you may be we4ll aware of two of the finest works of science fiction written over the past 100 years: Audous Huxleys A Brave New World and George Orwells 1984. In A Brave New World, Huxley attempts to warn us of a future plagued with interest supportive of scientific utopianism. A world in which people are just victims of propaganda to be manipulated. In 1984, George Orwell describes a petrifying dangers that man, in search of a Utopia may create via government in order to have an orderly society, but at the expense of the freedom of the people. In the book Big brother is always watching, Ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery. Yesterday, the U.S. Library of Congress said it will start saving and archiving all worlds tweets from around the world due to a new partnership with Twitter. Each public tweet from 2006, when the first began to date will be archived. This means that all information that is on the public timeline, from twitpics, to your location, to any link will be recorded for all of history for anyone to search and study. This just displays how significant view the Internet is in this digital age. After six months, all public tweets will be made available to the Library of Congress. It has been estimated that between 50 to 60 millions of tweets are published each day. Biz Stone, one of the founders of the micro-blogging service wrote there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation."
So be leery of what you send out in your limited 140 character space, for if you plan to run for congress or any political office, your tweets will be available for you opponents to use anyway fit.
the struggle continues - yet many dont care
sovereignty, liberity, freedom, rights or privilege
 It is only fitting that on this day we revisit history and not just any history, but that which empowered one Martin Luther King Jr., to embark on the continuation of the works, ideas and beliefs of freedom and liberty. Yes freedom and liberty for even with knowledge of King, Frantz Fanon, and Thomas Jefferson, such knowledge is lost on the hearts and minds of others. I say these because I have come to the empirical conclusion that many folks of my ethnic persuasion have accepted that we are free or even worse think we are free. Truth is that many can not tell the difference nor explain what separates liberty from freedom, or a right from a privilege.
For me, the concepts all start with the fundamental understanding of sovereignty a construct imbued in us not from or by any man but rather a Supreme Being or higher power. Sovereignty means supreme or highest in power. To be sovereign means to be independent of, and unlimited by, any other; possessing, or entitled to, original authority or jurisdiction. This is what liberty and freedom are based on in these United States of America with respect to the un-alien-able rights men documented in the constitution.
I say this because a sovereign individual is self-reliant and does not need anyone (even government) to provide for him, protect him from himself nor tell him what to do. To be sovereign means to be responsible for ones own actions, to be financial independent and free from unnecessary government interference basically living the life he desires. The problem again is that many do not understand theses concepts or how mandates are in direct opposition from the aforementioned concepts.
Recently Obama passed a Health Care reform bill that mandates folks buy health insurance, similar in the vein that we are mandated to purchase auto insurance and or wear seat belts (if your state demands such by law). Truth is some states do not and that there were times that it was not required to buy auto insurance or wear seatbelts. Many may be too young to remember such but it is true. When I mentioned my problem with this to a friend, he told me that he was glad such was mandated because driving is not a right but rather a privilege. I said that anything can do, create or think of is legal and provided to me by that greater than me and not a man. Also added that by your logic, reading and learning is a privilege also for that is how slave masters saw it that they could decided for you as government entities do now. I also added that also thought it was unnecessary for marriage license, gun permits and drivers license. Again he disagreed.So I reminded him of why we have both. There was a time when there was no such thing as either, that is until or near the end of slavery. Historically, all the states outlawed the marriage of blacks and whites. Not until the mid 1800s did some states allow such but in order to do so, they were mandated to received a license from the state (had to get permission to do an act which without such permission would have been illegal). Blacks Law Dictionary notes historically that a marriage license is defined as, "A license or permission granted by public authority to persons who intend to intermarry." "Intermarry" is defined in Blacks Law Dictionary as, "Miscegenation; mixed or interracial marriages." Up until this period their was no such thing and now states all use them as a way to make money for God requires no such permit. The same is true with respect to Gun permits. Throughout much of American history, gun control was used as a method for keeping blacks due to the racial fears of whites. Racist arms laws were on the books before the US was established. The French Black Code (required Louisiana colonists to stop "any black carrying any potential weapon, such as a cane)." If a black refused to stop on demand, and was on horseback, the colonist was authorized to "shoot to kill." Even before that the sixteenth century the colony of New Spain, prohibited all blacks, free and slave, from carrying arms. Mississippi went further, and prohibited any ownership of a dog by a black person. Such restrictions increased dramatically after Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831. Virginia's response to Turner's Rebellion prohibited free blacks "to keep or carry any firelock of any kind, any military weapon, or any powder or lead". Simply, America has a fear of armed blacks based on the collective unconscious of what many made Africans in America Experience. Even the end of slavery in did not eliminate or change racist gun control laws. Blacks even needed to obtain a license before carrying or owning a gun or knife when such was not required for whites. Even today the same practices based on race via mandates stem from what we saw in the years of slavery. From public housing residents being singled out for gun bans to so-called "Gun sweeps" by police in "high crime neighborhoods. All I am trying to say that we speak and accept these mandates by the government and they are often accepted under the guise of privilege as opposed to a right. We do not value freedom or liberty as much as we say or we would have continued the struggle that ore fore parents lead. It seems again as we think we are free, or think we have made or think we have overcome, but the truth is we accept with out question. Accepting mandates as such makes us slaves, obviates us from individual responsibility and takes away our enumerated rights stated in the constitution. I mean it is not rocket science if we are not sovereign, we have no liberty, if we have no liberty we have no freedom, if we have no freedom we have no rights all that is left is privilege, which by definition can be given and/or taken away at anytime.
handle your business folk
While many of us walk around oblivious too the serious economic conundrum our country is in, and remain inattentive to the world around us and feel secure in our little niche with our weekly pay checks, it is really a troubling time in our beloved country. The trouble from the way I see is multifaceted yet all inter-related. First the wild west financial entrepreneurship of recent years that lead to the creation of the derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt instruments, and the new boy on the block cap n trade futures. The reason they became so popular is because they allowed Wall Street banks to get around financial regulations because they were kept of banks balance sheets. Then they were packaged and sold for many times the values of the actual loans and when the housing market crashed they became basically worthless. My question I guess is why do we keep on doing the same dumb stuff? In the 1980s, we observed the Texas real estate bust; what we saw then is what we see happening now - folks taking government money and basically gambling with it to make a profit that the US citizen would have to take the loss for. My concern is that the Treasury and the FRB under the Obama administration are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. First by not trying to examine this economic crisis holistically(letting the Feds and Treasury examine this in the open) and rock us to sleep with the story line that all is well and will be happily ever after. Then there is the fact that our stagnant economic growth is also a function of lower tax revenues which means we as a nation will have to borrow more and more money. As of now, the proposed Obama activities including Cap N Trade and Health care reform will only stagnant growth more given their considerable cost. Even the Chinese government has stated publically their concerns with the US government debt since China holds a major portion of such debt. China owns US government bonds and Treasury notes at or approaching the $700bn of the bonds at the end of 2008. Now the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, based on 2009 data stated that 702 banks with a combined $402 billion in assets are at risk of failure this year. With all of this overt information, they to me are getting it all twisted again. They say they want to stimulate lending but this cant be done by throwing money at banks. The reason banks are not lending to each other is not because of a lack of loot to go around but because banks have no faith in the ability of borrowers to repay their debts for none of us know what institutions are solvent or on solid ground. In the great depression, banks failed because folk took their money out during the runs on banks. Today its due to the strange financial investment tools that financial institutions keep off of their books and we dont know what their value is or if they are worth anything at all. Obama as his predecessor George W. Bush lean toward a jobless recovery but have taken no steps to stop the increasing levels of unemployment. After reading his 2,585-page, $3.8 trillion document 2011 federal budget it is obvious that we will continue to go father into debt and that the brunt of this will be felt by us the average citizen. In his State of the Union Address he said that he would have a 3 year freeze on non discretionary spending but one cannot tell from reading his budget nor see how this will help our economy.
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